The Ataribox will cost under $300 and ship next spring

The Morning After: Tuesday, September 26th 2017

Sony patents player recognition on sci-fi scale

A patent Sony filed in May 2012 was recently uncovered, indicating the company has interest in knowing exactly who the users of its products are. The patent, titled "Process and Apparatus for Automatically Identifying User of Consumer Electronics," describes the inclusion of fingerprint sensors that would read biometric data of its users on products such as phones, keyboards and gaming controllers.

The patent's abstract reads, "A user of a device may be uniquely identified using a metric that is contingent upon the user using the device for its intended purpose without the user having to perform a separate step, function or operation for the express purpose of identifying the user." The document continues to elaborate on context-sensitive content that would be automatically generated for users upon identification.

Biometric data has mingled with gaming before, most notably when Nintendo introduced (but did not release) the Vitality Sensor device.